September '06

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How the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste spits on proletarian internationalism

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We have recently published on our website an article
on the intervention of the GCI (Groupe Communiste Internationaliste, Internationalist
Communist Group) towards the struggles of the students in France. The GCI is a group which many see as
being part of the left communist tradition, but as our article showed, this is
a complete fraud. Under its falsely radical flag, the GCI’s leaflet advocated
methods of struggle which are quite compatible with trade unionism, while at
the same time expressing utter contempt for the efforts of the young
proletarians of France to organise themselves outside of the unions, calling on
them to “smash the democretinism of the ‘sovereign and massive’ general
assemblies, spit on the ‘permanently elected and revocable delegates’”.

In the same way, when it comes to the imperialist
massacres spreading around the world, the GCI, which advertises itself as the
enemy of all nationalism, now spits openly on authentic proletarian
internationalism.

We have already shown this in another article ‘What is
the GCI good for[1]’ in International Review 124. Here we pointed out that
for the GCI, which has long had a fascination with the methods of terrorism and
guerrilla struggle, the majority of armed actions attributed to the
‘Resistance’ in Iraq are in fact expressions of the proletarian class struggle.
We cited this passage in particular:

“The whole apparatus of
the WorldState, its services, its
representatives on the spot, are systematically targeted. These acts of armed
resistance are far from being blind, they have a logic if only we are prepared
to abandon the stereotypes and the ideological brainwashing that the
bourgeoisie offers us as the only explanation for what is happening in Iraq. Behind the targets, and the
daily guerrilla war against the occupying forces, we can discern the contours
of a proletariat which is trying to struggle, to organise itself against all
the bourgeois fractions which have decided to bring capitalist order and
security to the region, even if it is still extremely difficult to judge our
class’ autonomy from the bourgeois forces which are trying to control our
class’ rage and anger against every kind of representative of the World State.
The acts of sabotage, bomb attacks, demonstrations, occupations, strikes... are
not the work of Islamists or pan-Arab nationalists, this would be too easy and
would only be a concession to the ruling class’ view which wants to limit our
understanding to a struggle between ‘good and evil’, between the ‘good guys and
the bad guys’, a bit like in a Western, in order to evacuate once again
capitalism’s deadly contradiction: the proletariat" (‘De quelques considérations sur
les évènements qui secouent actuellement l’Irak’, in Communisme n°55,
February 2004).

In fact, according
to the GCI, the level of class struggle and class consciousness in Iraq is so
high that the principal aim of the invasion of Iraq was to repress the class
movement there – the invasion was first and foremost a ‘police action’ by what
they called the ‘World State’ against a particularly combative fraction of the
proletariat. And in the chaos and slaughter that has followed the invasion, the
GCI continue to see a movement of the class so advanced that it has already
reached the level of armed struggle.

It would seem that this delirious
distortion of the true nightmare gripping Iraq has produced some reactions even among the
GCI’s sympathisers. The current issue of their review Communisme, arch 200,
no. 58[2],in fact takes what for
them is the unprecedented step of publishing the debate between the GCI and its
sympathisers. They begin with a letter which expresses severe reservations
about the GCI’s claims about the armed actions and bombings in Iraq:

“Your article about Iraq which appeared in the last
Comunismo, despite its attempt to situate itself within a class
perspective…..falls into the amalgam and homogenisation typical of the
bourgeois analyses of the situation in Iraq, which identify everything going on
there with the bloody and indiscriminate attacks that have nothing to do with
the proletarian struggle (which is indeed underway there). You fall into the
same error when you enumerate certain attacks, undoubtedly perpetrated by
bourgeois fractions (the CIA, the Saddamists, Syria, Iran…) such as those at Al Hakim, the UN or the
Jordanian embassy during the summer of 2003, as expressions of the proletarian
struggle”.

This is then followed by a longer text – whether from
the same source or a different one is not clear, but apparently the work of a
group – which again expresses doubts about some aspects of the GCI’s assertions
about the advanced level of the class struggle in Iraq. It questions the GCI’s argument that the
wave of lootings which swept the country in the wake of the invasion could in
general be qualified as a proletarian movement, pointing out for example that not
only government offices and Saddam’s palaces were looted, but also many
hospitals, which were stripped of vital supplies. They also list a number of
actions which are more clearly on a class terrain, such as demonstrations by
the unemployed or by workers demanding back pay. And while they still appear to
agree with the GCI that the “armed actions are for the most part rooted in
the working class in Iraq”, they nevertheless say that it is a tremendous error
to fall into the same homogenisation that the bourgeois media applauds so
gleefully:

“It matters little to us whether these attacks are the
work of Saddam partisans, of Syria or Iran, who aim to cover the US in Iraq
with mud, of Islamists or the CIA (when they are not the same thing); what does
seem clear is that they are seeking to terrorise and divide the Iraqi proletariat,
and in our eyes it is a terrible error to fall into the amalgam which is the
speciality of the bourgeois media which applauds these attacks, as the GCI does in its article on Iraq which, although
starting from a class perspective, contains a good dose of homogenisation and
confusion; this is also what the comrades of Arde[1][3] do
when , right away, and with little
argumentation, they presented these attacks on the UN or the sabotages as
expressions of the proletarian advance”.

The GCI, faced with this criticism, doesn’t back down;
on the contrary, it states its horrible amalgam even more shamelessly. For
example, faced with the reservations about the bombing of the UN HQ being
described as an expression of the proletarian combat, it replies:

“The ‘attack
on the UN’ which you so lightly count as bourgeois, using the insufficient
criteria that civilians died (in history there have been many violent acts by
the proletariat that have produced civilian victims!). It was precisely this
attack that was most denounced by all the bourgeois opposition factions in Iraq, in particular those that claim to be
directing ‘the armed struggle of the resistance in Iraq’”

In fact, in all probability this was the work of the
Zarquawi group, many of whose actions have also been condemned by a host of
other ‘resistance’ organisations. But in any case, the GCI is quite ready to
applaud such attacks on the ‘WorldState’, even when the proletarians who carry
them out have been “captured by bourgeois forces” – in other words, when they
are openly carried out by al Qaida or other bourgeois terrorist gangs. In fact,
they justify their delight in seeing the destruction of the TwinTowers with the very same argument:

“In Communisme no 48, ‘Capitalism=terrorism against
humanity; against war and capitalist repression’, we commented on the incidents
of September 11. At the same time that we showed that the proletariat has an
interest in the destruction of the objectives that represent and realise the
terrorism of world capital; instead of crying for the civilian victims, as all
the accomplices of democratic dictatorship did, we made it clear that this did
not imply saying that the attack was accomplished by the proletariat as a
class. Moreover, we clearly explained that, even when these attacks are carried
out by proletarians in the sociological sense of the term, although they
destroy centres of repression and world commerce and although we ourselves,
along withrevolutionaries all over the
world, feel great sympathy for these acts, we are not in support of the
organisations that carried out these actions. And so we do not deny that that
such actions are carried out by Islamist organisations, which we define as
centrist, ie the extremist organisations of social democracy, which constitutes
the last and most implacable rampart against the revolution”.

Thus while revolutionaries all across the world
denounced the massacre of September 11 as an act of imperialist war (and one in
all probability that was ‘allowed to happen’ by the American state to justify
its war plans); while we expressed our solidarity with the thousand of
proletarians immolated in this barbaric crime, the GCI could only feel its
“great sympathy” for the actions of Bin Laden and Co, who are bizarrely defined
as “centrists” (which traditionally defines a confused or indecisive fraction
of the proletarian political movement…), and who in any case were carrying out
an action – the destruction of centres of repression and world commerce – that
was “in the interest” of the proletariat.

“To consider
that an attack is correct, or as you say to applaud it, because it damages the
bourgeois state internationally, this does not imply, for us that we support
the organisation that brought it about”. The logic is typically Trotskyist.
Just as the Trotskyists use it to support nationalist proto-states like the PLO
or Hizbollah or the Kosovan Liberation Army, so the GCI has used it in the past
to justify its support for the actions of the Shining Path in Peru or the Popular Revolutionary Bloc in El Salvador.

And indeed for the GCI, for whom the acme of
proletarian action is the work of small, secretive, violent groupings, there is
no distinction to be made between the methods of the proletariat and the
methods of bourgeois terrorism. No wonder the GCI’s critical supporters are
confused. They want to be able to see which acts of sabotage, which bomb
attacks on coalition forces are carried out by Islamist reactionaries or
shadowy state forces, and which ones are carried out by ‘groups of associated
proletarians’. What they can’t see is that armed ‘initiatives’ by minorities which
have no connection to a class struggling for its own demands and with its own
forms of organisation can only be recuperated by the bourgeoisie and turned
against the interests of the working class, even if these actions are initially
the work of groups acting more or less spontaneously.

Alongside the GCI’s amalgam between class violence and
terrorism, their support for the Resistance in Iraq is justified by a hideous distortion of
proletarian internationalism. Peppered throughout their reply are quotes from
the Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magon. Magon was certainly a militant of
the proletariat during the 1900s until he was essentially assassinated by the US state in 1921. But some of the Magon quotes
used by the ICG about the First World War show a deep confusion which sets him
apart from the clearest internationalists of that time. We are thus told by
Magon in 1914:

“When our own die, we should weep; when the imbeciles
who fight to strengthen their own butchers die, we should laugh – it leaves
fewer obstacles to our struggle for the destruction of the present system. They
are not our brothers, those who are dying in their thousands in the battle
fields of Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania. They are our enemies; they are those who
want this system to last; they are the lackeys of capital, the church and
authority” Regeneracion
202, November 14 1914.

Just to make it clear that the GCI indeed agrees with
this appalling passage, they repeat: “Ricardo Flores Magon had no problem
delighting in the thousands of soldiers destroyed in the imperialist war of
1914-19… because he knew that they died as forces of the World State of
capital, because those being destroyed were not our comrades but our enemies,
ie those obedient soldiers who assented to die and kill on the battle fronts as
agents of the their ‘own’ bourgeoisie”.

It was never the attitude of revolutionaries like
Lenin or Luxemburg to treat the soldiers who were marched off to the front as
stupid slaves, enemies of the proletariat. On the contrary: Luxemburg refers to
the fine flower of the European proletariat being cut down on the battlefronts.
These proletarians, even though they were “falling on the field of
dishonour, of fratricide, of self-destruction” (Luxemburg, [4]Junius
Pamphlet[4]), remained our class brothers, and that was the basis upon which
revolutionary organisations called for fraternisation, mutinies, for ‘turning
the imperialist war into a civil war’. Revolutionaries denounced the slaughter
on both sides; they did not rub their hands with the sure knowledge that this
would lead to the revolution. On the contrary, the longer the slaughter went
on, the greater the danger that the working class would not be able to make the
socialist revolution and would be engulfed in barbarism.

The GCI takes this attitude towards the soldiers of
‘our’ camp as a model for their version of ‘revolutionary defeatism’ – one
which resembles like two drops of water the attitude of the Trotskyists for
whom ‘defeatism’ is invariably applied to one side only in an imperialist war. Although they argue that Magon did not make
the mistake of counting the opposing armies in the imperialist war of 1914 as
his allies, this is more than implicit in the GCI’s attitude when they say: “our
position is revolutionary defeatism, and every blow that accelerates the defeat
of our own state, which is today the same state doing the work of repression in
Iraq, is welcome, although very often the blow is delivered by proletarians
recuperated by bourgeois forces”. This is the classic logic of
anti-imperialism: we support anything that weakens our own imperialist power. What
it ignores is that, on this terrain, the weakening of one imperialist power is
the strengthening of the other. Thus the GCI makes itself a direct accomplice
of the imperialist war in Iraq.

The GCI has duped many elements searching for
communist position with its ultra-radical phrases and violent imagery,
particularly those influenced by anarchism. We on the other hand have long maintained
that the GCI is a clear expression of political parasitism (see the Theses on
Parasitism[5] in International Review 94, or on our website), a grouping
whose real raison d’etre is to play out a destructive role towards authentic
revolutionary organisations – in the case of the GCI, to the point of
advocating violent and even murderous attacks on them[6]. The GCI’s
position on the movement in France and the war on Iraq should lead some of the elements influenced
by it to reflect about the real nature of this group. For us there can be no
doubt that it is more and more openly doing the work of the bourgeoisie,
whether or not is directly manipulated by its state forces.

In France, the proletarians take a big step forward
in organising assemblies, and here comes an ‘internationalist’. ‘communist’
group to tell them to abandon the assemblies, spit on the principle of elected
and revocable delegates, and revert to trade unionist, commando type actions.
What could be better calculated to block any real coming together between the
communist minority and the mass movement?

In Iraq, this ‘internationalist’, ‘communist’ group sings
the praises of the endless shootings, bombings and acts of sabotage, which far
from expressing the class movement of the proletariat are a manifestation of
imperialist war in a phase of growing chaos and decomposition; they are the
work of bourgeois gangsters that are more and more orientated not towards
fighting the occupation forces but towards indiscriminate sectarian massacre. What’s
more, in making this repulsive amalgam, the GCI establishes a very clear link
in the records of the state’s security forces between those who refer to
themselves as internationalist communists and those who identify with international
terrorism. What better excuse for carrying out surveillance, searches and other
repressive attacks on revolutionary groups?

If we add to this the GCI’s record of threatening
violence against proletarian organisations, then it should be abundantly clear
that this group, whatever its real motives, needs to be recognised as a real
danger to the revolutionary movement. Those who want to discuss class politics
and proletarian internationalism should break all links with it as soon as
possible.

Amos

[1][7] Arde is a group in Spain
which is close to the GCI. The passage above also goes on to criticise the ICC
for merely making a “pale copy” of the bourgeois press and talking only of
Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq, not of classes. This is entirely untrue. We have
indeed talked about the situation of the proletariat in Iraq, and
have written about some of its efforts to struggle, but we have recognised that
it is facing the most terrible difficulties in affirming its class interests,
and is indeed in imminent danger of being mobilised for a bourgeois ‘civil
war’.